Hasta La Gadget!

Many geeks – myself included – have sometimes passed the time by debating who would win if this famous person squared off with this superhero, and so on. The upcoming collectible card game Triptych is a lot like that. The game features characters both fictional and real as well as other entities and geeky concepts.

At the core of it, Tryptich is a game of addition. Each card has a number on the top right corner. Players form a deck of 30 cards, but the total value of the cards in the deck must not exceed 120. Each round players draw three cards, and the player whose cards have the highest total value wins the round. Of course, it won’t be much of a game if that’s all there is to it, so the makers of Triptych added card types and abilities to the mix. For instance, George Washington has an ability called Revolution, which lets you subtract 5 to the value of a card with the royal or leader type.

In addition, abilities fall under four classes: Body, Mind, Spirit and Anytime. After players draw their three cards for the round, they play one game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine what abilities can be played that round. Rock is Body, paper is Mind and scissors are Spirit. As its name implies, Anytime abilities can be used regardless of the result of the Rock, Paper, Scissors played.

After playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, each player takes turns playing one card at a time, activating a usable ability if they choose and immediately resolving its effects. When both players have played three cards each, you then add the final value of your cards. As you can see, because of the abilities the individual values of the cards have most likely changed at this point. The player with the highest total card value wins the round.

The loser must then remove cards from his or her deck equal to the point differential between their total card values, e.g. if you scored 20 and your opponent scored 25, then you have to remove 5 cards from your deck. The game ends when one of you runs out of cards, with the winner naturally being the one with a card or cards remaining in his or her deck.

Those are the basic rules of the game, but there are other rules that I didn’t explain here. You can download the rulebook for free on the Triptych website. In fact, like Cards Against Humanity, not only can you download the rulebook, you can also download and print the starter cards and the first expansion for free.

Triptych also shares one of the weaknesses of Cards Against Humanity – some of its cards may offend or unnerve some people. For instance, there’s a Jesus Christ card and a Martin Luther King Jr., card. It’s nowhere near as offensive as Cards Against Humanity, but you should still avoid playing this with certain people.

Pledge at least $27 (USD) on Kickstarter to get the 90-card starter set as well as 12 dice as a reward. As mentioned in the video, the printed cards you’ll get as a reward have a higher quality compared to the free PDF of the same cards, so that’s a nice incentive to buy the set.

There are also higher reward tiers that let you send your own image or artwork to be printed on a card. Can you, Moby Dick and sports beat Albert Einstein, foreshadowing and drugs? Get Triptych and you’ll find out. My money’s on your team.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

There’s a fear that touchscreen devices like smartphones and tablets will one day turn kids into lifeless, imagination-less zombies. But technology isn’t all bad. And to bridge the gap between the toys of yesteryear and tomorrow, researchers at the National Taiwan University created a building block toy that can interact with apps on a touchscreen tablet.

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There has been much debate over the possibility of legacy, but popular devices, like the HTC Butterfly, Butterfly S and a few Desire-branded phones receiving Android 4.4 KitKat update. We came to know through a leak last month that the update is on the cards for the original Butterfly. The update has already been rolled out for HTC Butterfly S, and it appears that Kitkat isn’t far off for the original Butterfly. HTC has confirmed that the update is “coming soon.”

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HTC Butterfly Android 4.4 Update ‘Coming Soon’ original content from Ubergizmo.

If you like coming up with songs, but don’t know the first thing about composing or playing an instrument, most of your ideas are likely going to be lost because you don’t have a way to record anything. If you can get your hands on some sort of keyboard, that’s a good first step as it has everything laid out for you. However, getting through the process of recording sometimes takes away from your original idea as you forget and muddle things as you go. Not knowing which key is which makes this even harder as you wouldn’t even know what to write down!

The Imitone is hoping to change that, by letting you record with whatever is easiest for you to use. This program is ‘plug and play’, and can turn humming, playing an instrument, or tapping on a table into notes. It’s about as close to mind-to-MIDI as we’re going to get. This will work with all sorts of different music programs, including GarageBand. You don’t even need a fancy microphone, as it can pull from your laptop (if it has a built-in mic).

The interface looks almost like a video game, which will help in making it easy to navigate. This will give you volume control, scale selection, pitch bend/glide, and it can detect vibrato. There is a more professional version as well, called Imitone Prime, which will give you voice timbre control, multi-channel control, adjustable tuning, noise cancellation, and more. Regular Imitone will cost you around $25, and the Prime version will cost around $60.

Available for crowdfunding on Kickstarter
[ The Imitone – a mind-to-MIDI program that can make anyone into a musician copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

We’re just days away from Microsoft’s BUILD 2014 conference and there’s a lot of anticipation and excitement about the announcements that are expected. Nokia has also scheduled a press event on the sidelines of BUILD 2014 where it may unveil new Lumia smartphones. Microsoft is expected to talk in detail about Windows Phone 8.1, its next major update for the mobile platform. A new report claims that the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview release has been scheduled for April 10th.

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Windows Phone 8.1 Developers Preview Release On April 10th [Report] original content from Ubergizmo.